Hunnect Life Sciences – Our strongest branch

After acquiring significant experience in life science related translation, we made the decision to create a new branch inside our company – Hunnect Life Sciences.

Medical and pharmaceutical translations always require impeccable quality, which can only be achieved by adding both human and automatized extra quality checks to the traditional translation-editing-proofreading (TEP) process – and by choosing the right specialists. Whether we speak of clinical trials, documentation for medical devices, SPCs or other life science related texts, our highly specialized translators are the irreplaceable basis of high-quality output.

Our teams consist of native speakers of the target language living in the target country. They are not only language specialists, but also

MDs, pharmacists, biologists, chemists and other medical experts

who are continuously monitored and trained in order to provide the utmost quality and to continually develop their skills in our ever-changing industry.

The applied quality assurance methods range from back-translation (the comparison of the original to a text re-translated back to the source language for error detection) and 2-step review, to automatic checks with specialized software for numeric, formatting or even terminological errors or inconsistencies.

Case study: a clinical study translated into 15 Central and Eastern European languages

In May and June 2014, Hunnect translated the complete documentation for a clinical trial for a new drug aimed at the treatment of kidney disease in people with type 2 diabetes.

The study was conducted in 15 locales

and – as it is a mandatory requirement in international studies – all patients needed to receive clear, extensive and precise information about the study in their native languages.

The process we used included TEP and an additional review step by a third-party linguist (i.e. not a member of the original language team). Hunnect was in charge not only of the translation, but the project management of the whole language package as well. In this way the client could rest assured that the translation was of high quality while also being relieved from the pressure of coordinating organizational tasks concerning the process itself. The study was delivered on time to the client in all of the required languages, and no quality issues arose after the completion of the project.

The above case study presents only one of the 37 clinical trials that Hunnect translated just last year into 5 to 15 languages. What is the key to our success?

According to a recently conducted customer satisfaction survey, Hunnect excels in project management:

our clients praised our precision, the ease of communication with us

and our utmost respect for their requirements and deadlines.

Adding value constantly to life science-related projects has always been an aim and challenge at Hunnect. Creating a new division at our company, powered by in-house biologists and medical professionals, proved to be the right answer. The Head of Department, Mrs. Éva Tóth-Tölgyesi, who is a biologist and certified translator, leads the life sciences team to make sure we deliver what our clients require. We strongly believe that reinforced internal and external resources plus this centralized approach to life sciences projects will lead to even smoother management and more straightforward quality control.

Fields of expertise

Over the years, Hunnect has acquired significant expertise in various fields of Life Sciences from pharmaceutical translations and medical devices to microbiology. The majority of projects, especially clinical studies and SPCs, are translated from English into 10 to 15 languages and contain patient-facing materials (informed consent, patient training materials, campaigns and ad-hoc additional information), physician-facing materials and general documentation like protocols. All of these types of text need to be treated in a different way, keeping in mind the audience’s involvement, objectives and level of education.

Another significant portion of life science translations we continuously perform is medical reports, discharge summaries, autopsy reports and other sensitive hospital-related materials into English. The translation of this kind of content needs utmost precision due to its sensitive nature. Needless to say,

professional background, multi-year experience as well as a native level of English are all required

in these projects. The level of quality checks conducted on these projects is in fact closer to second proofreading than standard QA which consists of more formal checks.

The third type of text we regularly translate into several languages is documentation related to medical devices and apparel ­– from software, instructions for use, and service manuals to packaging texts (e.g. inserts, labels). These documents need translators specialized not only in medicine but the exact field of the medical product. Our pool of audited vendors, chosen based on experience and thorough testing, and developed through years of excellent performance, guarantees that the output fits the target linguistic and professional environment, is written in perfect language and is completely error-free.

Regulatory bodies such as the EMA and FDA release new templates and standardized documents from time to time. These templates are ultimately required to be followed by the linguists taking part in related pharmaceutical projects, and thus their use is strictly monitored during our QA process.